Archive for the ‘Raiding’ Category

It’s not Monday, and I’m a bit behind on everything, so here is my weekly brain dump on, er, Wednesday. But with good reason! Which I will tell you about later. Maybe.

On Raiding

Things are pretty static on this front, without much to report! Which isn’t necessarily bad. We snagged a second Baleroc kill (not without some effort, but it wasn’t too painful) and ended up with a good amount of time to flirt with Heroic Ragnaros for the first time. Except it was a holiday weekend. And no matter how many times you ask people to give you a heads up on their holiday intentions, it’s always a scramble at the last-minute when raid time comes.

That means we only got one of two nights to focus on him – but were able to go in an 24 man Heroic Cho’gall and Sinestra on Sunday with a few friends and family members tossed in to help. Alas, she was stingy with her Shard of Woe, which made us all a little sad. But Monday, with the healers showing that they don’t believe in vacations and free beer, we were able to go in and play around a bit with the big fire kahuna. And it was a lot of fun.

I’m quite sure that after week 3 the novelty of finding new and interesting ways to wipe on Heroic Rag will wear off, but for now it’s still fresh enough that people seem to be enjoying the progress. We have approached the fight with the mentality that this will take months to master, and each night we look at the next small step we need to accomplish to get to the end goal – a kill. Breaking the massive encounter up into smaller pieces of progression markers makes the encounter a little less intimidating for me, and I’d like to think others as well. While the end result is still a kill, we are trying to make sure that we don’t burn out our guild trying to get there. Each small achievement is one more step down that path. And eventually enough small successes will combine themselves into a large success.

We’ll get a kill on our time, and my only goal is to see that happen before the next content patch. Personally, I’m looking forward to the challenge. Read the rest of this entry »

There has been a bit of a stir up in the community lately regarding the concept of Heal Sniping and how it’s viewed by different healers. I’ve already offered my thoughts on it in several different comments as I worked my way through each post, and I’m not going to rehash them here. However, all of this discussion did get me thinking about a tangentially related topic. Competition.

Competition is not a four letter word.

Something that regularly confuses me a little bit is why people tend to classify healing competition as a bad thing. I mean, we ask all of our DPS to compete with each other regularly. We even go so far as to look at who is on the top and who is on the bottom – and to an extent insinuate that those on the bottom should strive to be on the top. Granted, there are encounters where DPS are given special assignments that will hinder their DPS for the good of the raid, but generally DPS is a rat race to see who can contribute the most for any given encounter.

Happy Monday, Everyone! Why is Beru so happy on a Monday? Well, mostly because after some very long travel I am finally back home. It feels good to come back home after living in a hotel for 10 days and raiding at the mercy of hotel internet for that period of time. And believe it or not, it feels good to actually cook a meal. Eating out really does start to lose its luster after about day four (and the five pounds you add in the time you are gone). Anyhow, I have some musings to dump out of my head after so much time. Forgive me if they ramble a bit, but I really need this brain dump.

On Raiding

Raiding has been very good to us as late. Last week we knocked out Heroic Staghelm. This week we saw Heroic Baleroc tumble after just two nights of work on him. Not only that, but the raid team surprised me with a one shot on heroic Staghelm and over 30 seconds left on the enrage timer. Truth be told, I think everyone was expecting a second Staghelm kill to take a few pulls to shore up and most people were as pleased as I was when we walked in, high on our Baleroc kill, and knocked him out fairly easily. We had a few deaths at the end of the second set of orbs (I let my co-soaker die :( ) but we pulled it out beautifully.

Heroic Staghelm

Healing Staghelm is a bit odd. There really isn’t much healing to be done on the fight outside of the orb phases – which are pretty healing heavy. Other than that it’s mostly just keeping the tank alive and topping up people who took damage from seeds or a leap. In fact, we have one priest who goes smite spec and DPSes everything but the orb phases. It hard to tell if I have a good grasp of the best way to heal the fight, as I help to soak an orb, which means I have lower legendary concentration up time. So it’s hard to tell if I should be doing certain things differently, or if I am doing things properly but see lower healing output than I’d like (comparatively) as a result of lower concentration. Read the rest of this entry »

So, this weekend I saw Cowboys vs. Aliens. I will come out and say right now that the only redeeming thing about the movie was getting to see Daniel Craig in chaps for two hours. In fact I’d even go far enough to say that I got more enjoyment out of wiping to Alysrazor all night on Sunday than I did watching that movie. I mean, to be fair, I really didn’t have high expectations for the movie from the start. I mean, the concept just seemed…off to me. Be that as it may, even Brade rated it as “wait for video”!

On Raiding

We have been working on Heroic Alysrazor. Contrary to what my raid may believe, I find it a really fun fight, but that might just be because I get to run around and cast ALL my heals while doing so. Feathers own. Anyhow, we’ve been working on the encounter and have pretty much narrowed a kill down to “everyone surviving”. If people live, we will win.

We had a 7% wipe last night, after just a night and a half working on the fight.

People have died to any number of things during the fight. Worms, brushfire, tornadoes, meteors. You name it, someone in our raid has probably died to it. Unfortunately, a kill on the encounter will boil down to individual play and survival. If our raid can live, we will have a kill. If our raid cannot live, we will wipe.

We are sub 50% after the first burn phase. We are usually low 30’s for the second burn phase.

As a leader, I feel somewhat impotent on this encounter. It’s mildly frustrating to have nothing to offer your raid outside of “just please, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS HOLY, stay out of the bad”. It’s not something that can be fixed on the macro level of the raid, but rather needs attention at the micro level of each player. Of course, after a few hours of the fight when I see someone die my inner monologue goes something like this: COME ON! I can bloodly well heal the tank, heal your brushfire eating ass, heal your tornado hitting ass AND still dodge the bad. WHY IS IT THAT YOU CANNOT DO YOUR JOB AND DO THE SAME?!?!? RAWR!!!

Of course, it’s just a few minutes after having such thoughts that I usually do something stupid and am forced to eat the words of my inner monologue. I guess that’s karma for you.

I think we will probably spend an hour or so with the fight tonight to see if we can net a kill out of her. We have a working strategy. We aren’t failing at the DPS check. So ultimately, it’s going to be up to each individual to determine our success. We will either get it done tonight, or we won’t. I’d like to think that we will – but I watched too many hours of people standing in the bad for it to be a sure thing ;)

What? You aren’t up on your Harry Potter?! That’s ok, let me educate you a bit so that my title makes a bit more sense. You see in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban the students are given an assignment that forces them to face their worst fears. Ron Weasley’s turns out to be spiders. Of course, later in the book Ron is met with (you guessed it) giant spiders! How does this play into my musings? Well, see if you can guess how I spent most of my time yesterday! ;)

On Raiding

We are currently working on our third Hard Mode encounter of this tier – Beth’tilac. Last night was our second night of work on the giant widow, and our first full night of attempts. After a few strategy changes from Thursday night, we managed to work her down to 22%, and are very close to a kill.

Of the hard modes that we’ve done so far, this is the one that I’ve found the healing to be the most intensive. I am assigned to heal one of the cave/broodling/spiderling DPS and it can definitely be a bit tricky, especially when Beth is spewing all over the raid. In addition to that, the raid damage in phase 3 is brutal. I find that my mana bar is plummeting and I am still working out how to manage it a bit more so that I have the resources to push through until the very end of phase 3. I have a few ideas, but won’t get to exercise them until we get back in there for some more attempts. Read the rest of this entry »

The other night Brade got a whisper from someone about recruiting. He advised this person what our current needs are – but also added in that we will always consider exceptional applicants. To which this person asked “what do you consider exceptional?”. This was a very well-timed question, because Brade and I had just had a conversation about this very topic based on some commentary that I offered to someone and was worried that I had offended this person, so I had rehashed the conversation with Brade for his feedback. But the question from the app really got me thinking.

What is exceptional?

I think the definition of exceptional will likely vary from person to person and circumstance to circumstance. But in light of my recent conversation and the question posed by a potential recruit I thought that I’d give you some insight into how I view exceptional. I actually have some very firm beliefs on this, because as a player, exceptional is something that I strive towards every time I step into a raid. I also recognize that what I value as exceptional may not weigh the same way for someone else – and that’s fine. This is merely a look at my philosophy and how I approach the game. Read the rest of this entry »

As the title hints, today’s musings are going to be somewhat picture oriented. Partly because I’m in a picture sort of mood, but mostly because I had all these screenshots lying about for a post, and instead of making a million posts, I figured I could wrap them all up into one :)

On Raiding

Many things have happened since we spoke last week! First and foremost being that we had extra time in our raid week this week to finish up the last of the achievements that most folks needed for the Glory of the Cataclysm Raider meta. We still have a few more to trudge through for folks, but the majority of our raid team walked out Wednesday Night looking a bit like this:

Glory of the Cataclysm Raider

We also found the time this week, after several sub-10% wipes, to knock out heroic Rhyolith. In fact, we went in last night and nailed it so quickly that I regretted our “warm up” on Beth’tilac, as it meant that we didn’t get the opportunity to start Hard Mode work with her. So it goes! Gives us a full raid night to circle back for some of the last few achievements folks need for the T11 meta – and I’m OK with that! Oh, and here’s the video of our kill. I may or may not have used Walk This Way as the music for it. Don’t judge! I found it hilarious.

I have spent enough time with the encounter in learning it that I feel comfortable enough to go ahead and work on a video guide for the fight, so you should see that here in the near-ish future.

Heroic Rhyolith Video (guide incoming soon!)

Oh, and before I forget. Guess who got the fire kitty staff from Fandral last night? That’s right! THIS TREE!

Fire Kitty!

On Dailys

I’m still trudging through my dailys each day. I can’t say that I’m overly thrilled by them, but I will tell you that the other night when I opened up the Druid of the Talon dailys Brade and I had a good bit of fun doing the achievements together. The kicker of this whole daily mess is that I don’t need anything from them. But being the pet collector and odd, fun thing fanatic that I am, I find myself obligated to trudge through them to get my toys. Although I have yet to expand past doing them on anyone but Beru.

Speaking of dailys. Guess who I found in my Setheria’s roost quest group the other day? None other than EJ’s Gurgthock himself. When I noticed I hollered “OMG I HAVE GURGTHOCK” to Brade – and then we both took a few minutes to explore his extremely creative attire while having a good laugh over the whole thing.

I wonder who his tailor is.

Meeting Gurgthock

On My Hands

They are still bothering me quite a bit, sadly. I’ve been back to the doctor about it again, and they ran blood work for Rheumatoid Arthritis. I haven’t received the results from those tests yet (someone remind me to call the damn doctor and find out what is taking so long), but I remain on the quest to improve the pain on my own. You all may recall that I purchased a new chair awhile back – and it’s wonderful. I absolutely love it. And while it did solve some of my posture and back pain from extended time spent in the chair, it did not, unfortunately, alleviate all of my hand pain.

And so I continue to make improvements to my home office to try and help. This past weekend I altered to top of my desk so that I could attach a keyboard tray. While I know that it’s better ergonomically for me, the jury will remain out on if it makes it less painful for my hands. I am truly at the point that I’ll try almost anything if I think it will help.

On Non-WoW Activities

I am going to tell you all something that may make you think less of me. Brace yourselves.

I am completely, 100%, addicted to The Glee Project on Oxygen. I’ve always been a Glee fan, but I am seriously loving this show, I can’t even tell you. I have my favorites and my least favorites. And every week I cross my fingers that my favorites don’t get selected to be removed. It’s silly, I know, but it’s a lot of fun and a good way to wind down after a long night of Sunday raiding!

Non-Glee related, I am still working through the first Song of Fire and Ice book. I think I’m about half way through and I’m enjoying it quite a bit. Even though I watched the HBO series and know what’s going to happen, I still find that the author’s writing is page turning and at times I have a bit of a hard time putting the book down.

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If you intend to use anything on this website, please have the courtesy to attribute what you share, and offer links back to this site. If you are unsure if you can use the content found here, please do not hesitate to contact me directly. ~Beru